"To the choirmaster: according to The Sheminith. A Psalm of David.
1 Save, O Lord, for the godly one is gone;
for the faithful have vanished from among the children of man.
2 Everyone utters lies to his neighbour;
with flattering lips and a double heart they speak.
3 May the Lord cut off all flattering lips,
the tongue that makes great boasts,
4 those who say, “With our tongue we will prevail,
our lips are with us; who is master over us?”
5 “Because the poor are plundered, because the needy groan,
I will now arise,” says the Lord;
“I will place him in the safety for which he longs.”
6 The words of the Lord are pure words,
like silver refined in a furnace on the ground,
purified seven times.
7 You, O Lord, will keep them;
you will guard us from this generation forever.
8 On every side the wicked prowl,
as vileness is exalted among the children of man."
Psalm 12
C.H. Spurgeon once said: 'No one knows, but he who has endured it, the solitude of a soul that has outstripped its fellows in zeal for the Lord of hosts; it dares not reveal itself, lest men count it mad; it cannot conceal itself, for a fire burns within its bones; only before the Lord does it find rest'. This is what this Psalm is about - the solitude, the awful sense of isolation that comes upon the servant of God who is intent upon walking close with Him. One commentator begins his exposition of the Psalm with the striking words: 'One penalty of living near God is keen pain from low lives'. A visitor once said to us that it was sensitive people rather than the more jovial extrovert people who were being used of God in their witness today to bless others. This, then, is the theme of the Psalm. It is not exactly spiritual depression, but rather a sense of the agony of the true spiritual life, its costliness and desolation. The setting is uncertain, and several similar times in David's experience have been quoted as probably giving rise to it, as, for example, 1 Samuel 23:11, the citizens of Keilah plotting his betrayal; 1 Samuel 23:19, the Ziphites deliberately meditating treachery; 1 Samuel 26:19, unscrupulous enemies poisoning Saul's mind against him. Any, or all, of these incidents may be fairly reflected in the words of the Psalm - the vanity each speaks with his neighbour, flattering lips and double hearts, and above all, the desolating sense that he stood alone. Surely there is common ground for us here - we may not have David's experience, but the pattern is often there. And is it not true, as it must have been true with David that it is not so much that this sort of experience comes, but that it continues unabated and without relief. It is this that breaks the spirit. We speak of the last straw that breaks the camel's back. This is how it was with him. Well might the commentators quote Elijah there, 'I, even I only, am left, and they seek my life'.